Driving EdTech Systems: Assemble an EdTech Leadership Team

Overview

In a rapidly evolving educational landscape, the lines between technology, instruction, and school operations are more blurred than ever. Edtech leadership goes beyond traditional roles, requiring close collaboration with various school and district departments and stakeholders to make impactful decisions and promote equitable technology use. This collaborative, team-based approach is a key focus of the EdTech Systems Guide, developed by The Learning Accelerator (TLA) in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s. Despite this clear need for shared leadership, many schools and districts still rely heavily on individual technology leaders to make decisions that impact the whole school community. Moving forward, it's essential for edtech leaders to build and empower diverse teams, ensuring that responsibility and ownership of edtech decisions and initiatives are widely shared among key stakeholders.

Process

This resource provides school- and system-level edtech leaders with a process for assembling an edtech leadership team that can help translate the EdTech Systems Guide and a vision for equitable edtech systems into practice.

Set a Vision for Distributed EdTech Leadership

Before you can distribute edtech leadership, you need a clear vision of what shared leadership looks like in your context. Shared leadership can take many forms, and the equityxdesign spectrum offers a helpful framework for defining your vision. This framework outlines three distributed leadership structures based on the role the traditional leader wants to play, as well as the types of decisions, choices, and power they want to share with their team. As you review the structures below, think about which might work best for your context, considering factors like your capacity and the urgency of your improvement processes.

Distributed Leadership Structures

Choosing a leadership structure doesn't lock you into one decision-making approach. In practice, strong leaders will adjust their approach based on the challenge and context. For example, a leader might adopt a user-created approach when designing a new edtech evaluation rubric but take a user-centered approach when surveying teachers to identify professional development needs for the upcoming year.

Recruit Diverse Perspectives

In addition to setting a vision for distributed leadership, you must consider the relevant people to invite to drive your edtech systems improvement work. While obvious choices might include leaders of other school or system departments impacted by technology (e.g., operations, instruction) or a subset of teachers or students whose needs and experiences you want to elevate, it is important to think about whose voices are best suited to help foster systems-level change. To determine who should be part of the edtech leadership team, consider the following questions:

• Whose experiences or perspectives are especially valuable for understanding your edtech systems, identifying system-level challenges, and shaping system-wide solutions?

• Whose expertise will complement your own? Are there information technology (IT), academic, or operational leaders whose areas of expertise overlap with technology?

• Which stakeholder groups are not traditionally represented in your edtech systems or school- or system-level decision-making processes?

Remember that assembling an edtech leadership team is just one way to engage your stakeholders. Depending on your capacity and context, you might invite some stakeholders to join your edtech leadership team while engaging other groups in ways that would strategically inform your decisions. For example, one team might directly recruit teachers from across a school system and support them in engaging in systems-level thinking. In contrast, others may limit their edtech leadership team to system-level leaders and routinely engage teachers through focus groups or surveys to inform decisions.

Co-Create Expectations

Your edtech leadership team’s success will depend upon a shared understanding of the team’s goals, everyone’s responsibilities, and expectations for how and when the group will work together. In your first meeting with your edtech leadership team, develop shared expectations and processes to guide your work. Be sure to consider the following questions:

• What is the overall goal of the edtech leadership team? Do all team members agree that is the goal?

• When and how often will the team meet?

• How will the team collaborate and communicate about the work asynchronously?

• Who is responsible for specific tasks (e.g., developing surveys, analyzing results, communicating decisions)?

• Where will you track progress and take notes?

These answers may change over time based on your school or district needs, team needs, capacity, context, and the specific challenges your team is addressing. Setting these expectations upfront will be helpful, but since they are co-created, you can revisit them as needed to ensure the group remains aligned and fosters collaboration.

This strategy is a part of TLA's Driving EdTech Systems series, which accompanies the EdTech Systems Guide developed in partnership with MA DESE OET. Explore the full guide to find additional strategies, insights, and resources.